Primal Scream: Bristol Beacon – Live Review

Primal Scream
Bristol Beacon
31st March 2025

Primal Scream serenades Bristol Beacon with a slick and soulful new sound. Elliott Simpson reviews.

You only realise how eclectic Primal Scream’s discography is once you see them live. For most of their forty-year career, the band have hopped back and forth between two distinct modes: Rolling Stones-inspired blues rock and a weirder, acid-tinged sound, best exemplified by 1991’s Screamadelica. And with their latest album, last year’s Come Ahead, the band have attempted to add yet another arrow to their genre quiver: soul.

Frontman Bobby Gillespie dug deep into the music that coloured his childhood for Come Ahead, even assembling a gospel choir to give the songs an authentic sheen. Though Primal Scream’s buzz-saw guitars occasionally rear their head, the album is more measured and tasteful than anything the band have put out before; the emphasis is on violins, cellos, saxophones, and funky bass licks. During the band’s Bristol Beacon performance, the stage setup felt like a reflection of this mood shift, too – white suits, glittery dresses, red curtain backdrops and all.

Many of the new songs sounded good live, with Come Ahead’s opener, Ready To Go Home, packing a particularly soulful punch. Similarly effective was Love Insurrection, which allowed the band’s two singers to go full-belt. It was hard to shake the feeling that this was an unconvincing outfit for the band on the whole, though. When the pace slowed down in the middle of the set and more emphasis was placed on Gillespie’s voice, the cracks began to show.  He just doesn’t have the vocals to sell a soulful crooner like Heal Yourself. This was made all the more apparent when he followed it with an older Primal Scream ballad, I’m Losing More Than I’ll Ever Have, where his gnarled and torn-up vocals felt like a perfect fit.

As a result, it was only when Gillespie stripped off his white blazer halfway through the show that things began to pick up. The band felt more comfortable in their blues-rock sound, with tracks like Rocks and Movin’ On Up generating the biggest reactions from the crowd. Only on a few of these songs did the band veer too close to parody, like the main set closer to Country Girl. Though the squalling guitars were undeniable, the cartoonishly simple lyrics were difficult to get past. This wasn’t helped by the video that accompanied the performance: a Stetson-wearing cowgirl dancing around in a saloon bar.

To me, Primal Scream are at their best when they ditch the American guises and take things in a weirder direction, and so it was the songs from Screamadelica and XTRMNTR that resonated the most. It’s hard to deny the timelessness of a song like Loaded, even if it does push Gillespie to the background in favour of sampled vocals. Then there’s Come Together, which landed during the show’s encore. Despite the gospel flourishes that coloured the band’s new material, none of them came close to the resonance of that song’s hook: ‘Come together as one’. A message delivered so simply and so directly that it’s impossible to deny. For all the show’s weak patches, it demonstrated that Primal Scream are still capable of achieving moments of true transcendence.

~

Primal Scream can be found on their website, Instagram, and Facebook.

All words by Elliott Simpson. You can find more writing by Elliott for Louder Than in his author’s archive and other work on his website. His 33 1/3 book on Yo La Tengo’s And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out is available now.

Photos by Michael Brumby. More work by Michael can be found on his website.